Stones Being 'Handed' a Supporting Role

Welcome to Thinking With My Hands where a picture is worth a thousand hand-thoughts.

Stone is such a lovely medium. It not only stands alone as a highly practical and beautiful building material, when used in conjunction with other things such as glass, steel and concrete it compliments them and accentuates their good qualities. The contrast between stone and more modern elements of construction make for very interesting visual effects.

Unlike these materials however, most stonework completed on a site, at any stage of the rest of a construction project, exists as the 'final product', in that the plaster, steel or wood and most of the other elements of a building project or landscape installation require covering, painting, preserving or protecting in some way before everything is finished, and this by contrast is done usually quite near to the end of a project.

Stonework, on the other 'hand', will get bumped and knocked by contractors, fireplaces and benches will get used during construction, new walls will provide support for other less finished elements of the project, and outside dry stone retaining walls will provide the finished 'base' for plantings and other landscape features, which otherwise could not be introduced on site . Any number of decorative functions are accommodated and assimilated by stone, which then humbly goes on doing the job while these things get finished, and it still goes on looking good after everything is done too.

This dry stone platform was completed yesterday. It will be the base for a special steel sculpture which after being fabricated will be installed on top. The sculpture will need to be welded together on site, secured properly, and then touched up so that it looks good.

Afterwards people will come and admire the sculpture.

Sphere of the unknown.

How's this for an innovative approach to thinking about public art installations?
The concept is best understood as an 'interactive' dry stone structure - a sculpture that is evolving and can be rebuilt again and again in an ongoing interaction between the audience and the creator.

The artist is committed not only to its conception and creation but also caring for his or her work over the duration of its 'life' in the park. This is not normal maintenance. This is adaption.

In that it is created of random common stones merely laid in a certain arrangement, the material in the sculpture like that in a dry stone wall can be reused and relaid. The few that go completely missing are simply replaced.

The structure yields and transforms within a larger definition of what art is. - There is growth and decay, injury and healing taking place throughout the work. It absorbs the impact of time, weather and even public mischief as part of an artistic/holistic event. The influences upon it are not resisted as much as assimilated.

Decomposition is the 'plot' of the composition. Part performance art, the work is interpreted not just through the artist, but through the hands of the participants who's desire to change or even deface it. The art merges into something else and our understanding of what the piece represents is broadened. This is a 'sphere' of public art that deserves to be explored.

Walling As Art.

Our involvement in Nuit Blanch last Saturday allowed many Torontonians to experience dry stone walling as an art form. Usually stones walls made without mortar are things you merely drive by and at best perhaps say 'look, isn't that nice'. But last Saturday the act of walling somehow moved from being merely a craft, or even a kind of visual art form, to that of being 'performance art'. It may seem strange to think of building with stone as something approaching the realm of dance or theatre, but when you eliminate all the mortar, the dusty work site, the cooky cutter shaped material and all the noisy tools, while at the same time ramping up the creative part by introducing improvisational elements, you get something akin to entertainment. Meanwhile the live music played on 'hand' bells by the Bronze Foundation who accompanied us at this event, very much added to the perception of what we were doing being a performance. Many of us had this sense that the actual process of building of the bell was as important as the finished product.

Bell Nuit!

The Bell nearly completed, (towards 1:30 in the morning) after 6 hours of solid building.

Hundreds of people coming by to watch us all night.

Many many people told us it was the most interesting thing they saw at this year's Nuit Blanche

The morning after

Ringing with our hands.

Tonight is Nuit Blanche, an all-night celebration of the arts in Toronto. As many of you know, in honour of this event we are going to be downtown at Trinity Bellwood Park on Queen Street just east of Ossington Street, putting together a spontaneous '12 tonne composition'. Many wallers, friends of wallers and walling enthusiasts across Ontario will be joining us to create a huge bell-shaped sculpture in the park in the dark. As far as we know, this unique dry stacked stone bell, (having niches and crannies all through it, and brightly lit from the inside) will be the first one of its kind ever built and yet it will exist for barely 7 hours and then we will take it down.

While we build, a full bell orchestra will accompany us in this carzy multi media audio visual architectural/sculptural project.

After many years of almost complete obscurity, it is gratifying to see the craft of dry stone walling starting to become an accepted art form in Canada and adherents to the technique of 'walling without mortar' make such a strong showing in artistic events such as Nuit Blanche.

Why a stone bell?

Perhaps because it visualizes one of the less obvious aspects of stone. It's tone!

Lake District lithophone: the sound of rock music

Coming Up Empty-Handed Sometimes

We were politely notified yesterday in a letter that a proposal we had submitted to the City of Saint John, New Brunswick in its open public art competition, was not selected. We had collaborated with artists out west and in the states on an original idea involving stone carving, lettering and massive semi-dry stone arch construction using a unique fastening system.

Tomas Lipps, director of the Stone Foundation, ever on the look out for this sort of thing, kindly tipped me off about this contest way back in May.

The official blurb read "As part of the celebration of the 225th anniversary of The City of Saint John – Canada’s first incorporated city was pleased to invite professional artists resident in Canada to submit formal proposals to design, develop, create, deliver and install permanent exterior public artwork (“Public Art”) that would be prominently displayed along Saint John’s Harbour. The Public Art would be installed at a location on a triangular-shaped parcel of land along Saint John’s Harbour Passage, bordered by three Harbour Passage pathways and bordered above the parcel by Saint John Harbour Bridge"

The official theme for this work of art was supposed to be ' The Meeting Place'

There was a lot of form filling and as part of the lengthy description of what this tripartite structural/sculptural pieces of artwork was to look like we proposed that it was to be a celebration of the " watery elements of Saint John which were the primary ingredients in its founding. Three half-arches triumphantly spring from the earth, to meet at a central point. This dynamic assemblage of stone, 16.5 feet tall with a 30 foot diameter and weighing 25 tons was to represent the Saint John River, the Kennebecasis, and the Bay of Fundy. These individual half-arches, like the people who live surrounding these waters, are bonded by a mutual dependence. On the base of each half-arch there was to be a bas-relief panel depicting three significant periods in Saint John history:

1 Pre-European contact,

2 European settlement,

3 The Contemporary era.

The structure was to symbolize a three-point meeting place of the waters."

The jury accepted a design and awarded the commission to a local New Brunswick artist.

Ah well, maybe we can 'meet' somewhere else next year. Thanks to all those who were involved and collaborated in this proposal. You know who you are.

Twisted Sisters.

The twisted Sketchup preliminary drawing

The real twisted thing, completed yesterday.

Twisted brothers and twisted sisters.

Handy dandy obelisk.

I built a dry stone tree today. Well, it is more like a truncated tree with 6 cut off limbs. It's over 8 feet tall. I was inspired to build it after I came across a few longer stones ( that I thought would make good 'branches' ) and had put aside for just such a tree sculpture. One stone had a particularly nice curve to it. By placing another long 'double-branch stone' over it for weight, I was able to place it in the trunk, curving upwards, like a branch.

The trunk is about 2 feet in diameter and in fact the tree is built on the stump of a rather large ( 70 feet tall) pine tree that our son Robin the arborist handily cut down for us last month, because it was very dead and dangerous. Below is a clip of him cutting it down.

In the photo above Mary is seen planting a newly purchased, fragrant, climbing Hydrangea at the base of the stone tree. She wanted me to build her an obelisk for it to grow up on. I'm not sure what I built is exactly what she had in mind.

Anyway, now we have a stone tree as a monument commemorating the 70 foot pine tree, erected on the very site where it once grew.

Tactile Art

The Art Gallery of Ontario has a massive permanent collection of impressive works of art. It is a museum comparable to any of the best in North America. In 2008 an exciting new redesign was completed by world-renowned architect Frank Gehry, and was received with international acclaim. The Galleria Italia, is particularly interesting with its long display area which is an extended enclosed facade area crafted of curved laminated wooden beams and glass which runs the entire length of the north side of the gallery. The museum has an extensive Group of Seven collection and many many contemporary works worth seeing. The collection of older works of art is a treat to come back again and again to explore.

The whole delightful experience is a primarily a visual one. Priceless works of art can not be touched unfortunately. There are signs in strategic places to remind the public of this fact. The hands have to be content to imagine what everything feels like. It is hard to resist touching some of a new exhibit of artist Wangechi Mutu's evocative multi-media collages with their complex layers of painted and decorative fabric intricately blended together with photo images of the human body.

Now and then a special gallery show may display some works where the public is invited to 'touch', but in most cases it's the artwork that does all the touching, not the other way around. And while this is legitimate and understandable, it does leave me wondering. What if it weren't just the eyes that informed the mind at an art gallery, but that if we could learn from the hands too. What if the fingers were allowed to follow the contours and textures of the artwork displayed. Imagine if the hands were free to feel with the same freedom the eyes are allowed to see. A wax resist, a complex tapestry form, a welded metal edge, the roundness of a wooden sphere, a sudden contrast of paint textures, a curiously feathery shaped object , the bends in a wire frame sculpture: these all would tell more of a creative story. They could only inspire the imagination more. The sensation of art would be more well-rounded.

There was one very tactile element in the room where the Muto exhibit was being shown. Bullet holes. They were all over the walls. These were actually random puncture holes in the plaster surface, some of them extending deeper into the concrete sub wall. They were tinted red for extra effect. It gave an extra dimension to the already disturbing element of the paintings hanging on these same walls. My daughter and I put our fingers into several of these ragged holes. Nobody ran over and stopped us.

I think I would have preferred to be exploring more positive things with my hands like interesting stone cavities and niche recesses of randomly stacked stone walls upon which the art work was actually hung, instead, but Im feeling that Mr Goldsworthy may have already come up with that idea.